#my frustration is with the fact that pokemon is the largest media franchise in the world and their products are of abysmal quality

[weaselishmcdiesel]

pokemon rant ahead bc im a born hater what can i say <3

playing scarlet and i just caught chien pao which i wanted on my team before id started playing and was just picking which pokemon i like best. the fucking?? running animation?? is fucked up?? there SEEMS to be a walking animation like it exists and i get a glimpse of it every now and then but it seems like it refuses to use anything but the running animation. so you cant reasonably walk beside the pokemon because its animation is freaking the fuck out, angles get fucky, the thing runs ahead of you, just bad. it's just i really wish that the follow mechanic wasn't dogshit, i want to stroll around with my pokemon not lagging behind. how come every other game can figure out a follow mechanic. how come modders can figure it out (there's maybe a chance the pokemon is stuck running because i caught it at a higher level than my current badges give me control over but idk if that's how the game works)

and another thing i noticed (that everyone else probably noticed bc this game has been out for a while lmfao but-) the entire world feels like it was MADE for exploration on koraidon. if we compare it to botw/totk, the terrain in those games doesnt feel like they were made for horseback exploration. there are so many huge wide expanses in scarlet that, the moment you get off your ride, you feel small and out of place. like there's absolutely no incentive to walk around on your own because everything is too far away to comfortably explore on your own (and also there's hardly anything TO explore. everywhere is empty and boring and repeating). botw does not suffer from this at all, all the environments feel realistic in scale. and i wish if the game were more focused on the horseback (pokemonback?) exploration that there was more fidelity to koraidon's animations and mechanics. I believe it's called procedural animation, the ability for a model to react to the environment it's in (ei, when link is on a slope, his leg will bend and his foot will rest realistically on an incline, same goes for horses in botw when theyre on inclines. these are calculations the game makes in the moment of execution, not rendered out during development accounting for every possible position a player could be on a slope). i feel like this should happen with koraidon at the least, if you're going to be on it for the majority of the game.

and don't get me STARTED on how absolutely stupid it is for so many pokemon to be as small as they are. constantly tripping on a 2 centimeter tall pokemon that i didn't see and initiating a battle gets really fucking old. from purely a game design standpoint, for one of the first games in the series to feature pokemon walking around in the overworld, youd THINK they'd somehow incorporate more accessibility for being able to SEE these fucking things, but no. the camera is far from the player (i play with the camera as close as possible, i know it's adjustable) and the grass that's fucking everywhere is taller than a lot of pokemon. also the shiny issue. how the pokemon from this gen have a lot of MINUTE differences in their shiny palette that make shiny hunting more of an eye-strain simulator than anything.

and i know that there are a lot of pokemon in these games meaning a lot of assets meaning a lot of space thats dedicated just to make creatures appear. i know all of that takes away from the space needed to make animations or appealing scenery or really just a substantial game. but remember when they said theyd limit the pokedex so that they could make sure the pokemon they DO include have higher quality models and animations? and remember how they never actually did any of that. (changing the rendering engine and the textures is NOT higher quality anything. and if you think it is, how come the textures on hills FUCKING SHIFT AS YOU WALK PAST THEM? THATS A LOWER QUALITY ENGINE!!! THAN WHATEVER THEY USED BEFORE!!!)

i'm just saying that i really wouldnt mind if they HUGELY limited the pokedex IF IT MEANT that we could get cutscenes with unique animations and effects. get rid of a few hundred pokemon if it means the overworld is decorated with more than a dozen repeating assets that make it difficult to tell where the hell i am without looking at the map. maybe i want to see big wind turbines in the background move at more than 2 frames per second! why is the largest landmark in the area moving at 2 frames per second?! bad!!! ugh.

i think all the issues i have with this game are reasonable grievances for a game that costs 60 fucking dollars. i dont want to hear a single "it's just a kids game!" it was 60 fucking dollars. +dlc +online subscription

theres lots more i can say but this is just what's really bothering me right now hahasdfk